Paper short abstract:

The paper focuses on how traditional forms of caste hierarchy and other categories of workers’ identity are engaged as a mode of control and discipline to reproduce casualised plantation labour.

Paper long abstract:

Indian tea production has been in severe crisis since the mid-nineties largely due to neo-liberal structural adjustments in the Indian economy. The crisis punctured the isolated environments of the plantations and precipitated neoliberal reforms that closed down production in many areas either partially or completely. While many families remained on the plantations, large numbers of Tamils who had lived there for more than five generations were now compelled to seek work outside.

As the crisis-ridden plantations are taken over by new companies, they have recruited Adivasi migrant workers from Eastern India to replace the Tamil workers. The new workers from Jharkhand were denied temporary and permanent work status as they were illegally maintained as casual laborers. This casualization of work consequently denied them rights and welfare measures guaranteed under the plantation labour act of 1951. This casualization coupled with discrimination based on ethnic stereotypes not only reproduces this community as casual laborers, but also normalizes their marginality. In a similar manner, the Tamil Dalits who left the plantations for Coimbotore-Tirupur industrial belt are also maintained as casual workforce where they work for twelve hours a day to meet the deadline provided by large contractors. These workers, fear of being discriminated for being Dalits, attempts to hide their caste identity to make way through the caste ridden industrial township of Coimbotore-Tirupur. This paper explores how the presumed identities of Dalits and Adivasis are used in reproducing the class order in the fields and factories.